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Godzilla is obviously becoming a mega-hit that restores the vaunted 60-year franchise to its rightful place in monster movie history.

Part of the reason for its success is that the Hollywood filmmakers led by American producer Thomas Tull and English director Gareth Edwards consulted with the Japanese at Toho Pictures in Tokyo. They all paid close attention to the physical design of the new monster, maintaining features from the original 1954 classic while making him bigger (at 355 feet tall) and bringing him into the digital effects era. Fans are not recoiling in horror like they did watching the 1998 version.

Another strange and wonderful thing happened. The filmmakers gave Godzilla a new voice. It contains echoes of the original but now Godzilla’s roar can make the ground shake. Inside theatres, the sound hits your sternum with a powerful percussive force, just like standing next to Big Ben inside London’s famous clock tower (which I have done when the clock hit 10 o’clock). People cheer when they see Godzilla for the first time in Godzilla — and they thrill at the sound of his voice. They feel it in their bones.

“In our humble opinion,” Tull says in an interview about how he, Edwards and sound designer Erik Aadahl worked on the roar, “we fully got it right. It was an amazing moment! There are a lot of things in there and, frankly, the interesting thing is that there is one special ingredient in the roar, in the sound design, that Erik alone knows about. I don’t and neither does Gareth.”

Actually, Edwards does know, he confides later. During production, Aadahl did keep it a secret. “He basically wouldn’t tell me because he didn’t want to ruin the movie for me once I knew what it was,” Edwards says with a grin. “It’s nothing animalistic. It’s very natural.” Edwards will not let the secret out to the public. “But what I can say is he let me in on it on the last day when we said goodbye.”

The roar has an interesting history, Edwards explains. “The original Godzilla sound they used in all the (Japanese) movies was a leather glove with resin on it scraping down a double bass. Don’t ask me why they did it. It sounds a bit kinky to me. So that’s how they found that sound. We brought in a double bass and a leather glove and we tried all sorts of things.”

But Hollywood could not find the new roar with the old technique, so Aadahl experimented with new technology: super-sensitive, ultra-fast microphones that provide full fidelity, even when played back at super-slow speeds. “So this whole new world of audio was opened up,” Edwards says. The roars for Godzilla’s enemies in the movie were created this way. But his roar remains a mystery.

Ambient sound is far more important to the experience of cinema than most audiences realize. Sound recordings of natural and man-made things set a mood, a place, even a time. Manipulation of natural or mechanically-created sounds creates something fantastical, like the hum of the lightsabers in Star Wars, which came from the creative genius of two-time Oscar winner Ben Burtt.

As for Erik Aadahl, Edwards calls him a genius, too. Aadahl has been nominated for two Oscars, for Argo and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Expect another nom for Godzilla. Oscars in the two sound categories often mistakenly go to the loudest movie nominated. And Godzilla is very loud. But an Academy Award win might also reinforce the notion that Hollywood has restored Godzilla’s dignity as a monster.